There’s definitely no shortage of prison documentaries out there. There are dozens on Netflix alone, all highlighting the harsh realities of life inside the system. The violence is often staggering, the crimes committed by the inmates featured often horrifying and senseless. There’s a market for series like these, perhaps largely because they open a window into a fascinating yet terrible world most of us will thankfully never inhabit, but there’s some truth to the idea that most entries in the genre are largely the same, no matter how interesting or entertaining.

Girls Incarcerated takes an entirely different path, following a group of young female offenders who are loud, angry, and unruly, certainly. They’re also smart, funny, and often struggling to come to terms with the difficult realities of growing up poor, black, addicted to drugs or alcohol, parentless, or any number of other struggles. It’s as heartbreaking as it is frustrating at times, watching girls as young as 13 spending time behind bars for committing crimes they’re still too young to understand the gravity of and many only did as a form of acting out due to feelings of neglect, anger, or pain.

Take 16-year-old Najwa Pollard, stuck at the Madison Juvenile Correctional Facility indefinitely as she was underage and had no legal guardian who would come to claim her so she could be released. Pollard was often vulnerable on camera, revealing the abuse she’d experienced at the hands of her father and the strained relationship she had with a largely absent mother. It’s difficult to watch someone so young go through so much pain, especially since her imprisonment seemed largely to due with her troubled upbringing. While that’s certainly not an excuse for breaking the law, it certainly makes you more sympathetic to the underlying circumstances behind it.

Najwa Pollard.Photo: Netflix

Of course, like most teenagers, many of the girls featured in Girls Incarcerated were frustratingly stubborn, arguing constantly and misbehaving simply to assert their own perceived independence from the system they were now a part of. Inmate Heidi Lakin often lashed out both at her peers and the detention center staff for seemingly no reason, regularly bragging about her ability and intention to beat up a fellow inmate for no reason other than that she “had a smart mouth.” This behavior isn’t out of place in a high school, so while the big talk wasn’t necessarily believable, it was yet another reminder of just how young these girls are—and in many ways, how normal.

Growing up is hard for everyone, but given the difficult life circumstances many of these girls have faced already, their trajectory, while tragic, isn’t necessarily surprising. While the staff at Madison Juvenile go the extra mile to offer the teens the support system they so clearly lack in the outside world, it’s tough to hear so many of them admit that while they have big dreams, they also feel apprehensive about leaving the relative safety and comfort of the facility. This is certainly the case for 17-year-old Brianna Guerra, locked up for offenses like robbery, drug use, and underage drinking. As her release day grows closer, she reveals to the camera that she thought she would feel more excited but instead, she doesn’t actually know what she’s going to do when she gets out. It’s no surprise that she violated her probation a month later and was rearrested and held at another facility.

Netflix

Where Girls Incarcerated differs from other prison documentaries—other than featuring young women rather than hardened adult criminals—is that it focuses less on the specific crimes committed by the girls and focuses more on the motivating factors which led them there, as well as the mental and emotional journeys each of them are on as they work towards their release. While conventional wisdom might point towards most of them continuing on a path of regular offending and incarceration, hearing the girls speak about the things they’d like to do and what they’d like to be when they grow up is heartening. It makes viewers hopeful that their futures aren’t quite set in stone.

The overarching message of the series seems to be that we truly shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, or write it off altogether because a few chapters were bad. The odds may be stacked against the girls, but with the right help and support, there’s every reason to believe that they can achieve the goals they’ve expressed to having for themselves, whether that’s to become a cosmetologist (like Aubrey Wilson) or getting into TV and radio like Brianna Guerra. There’s a big world out there, and there’s no reason these girls can’t conquer it—they just need a little extra help getting there.

Jennifer Still is a writer and editor from New York who cares too way much about fictional characters and spends her time writing about them.